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The question is, what’s more valuable to the Murdoch clan: power
or money?

I’d follow the money every time. Oh, Dad, cares about power, for
sure. He cares about his legacy, too. Given his time left on this
earth, I’d say there’s no time to repair that legacy in
journalistic and political terms. If he also leaves a company
worth nothing to his heirs, then he has no tangible legacy. That
is surely what his heirs care most about — most do: money.

So I wonder whether News Corp. will have to get out of the news
business to save the business of News Corp. For it’s not so bad
to be rapacious when you’re in the entertainment business.

You might say that Rupert would have his newspapers pried from
his dead hands and that might well be the case. But know well
that he is not loyal to media. I used to work for TV Guide. He
loved magazines then. Things turned sour. He got rid of them. He
worked his ass off to get satellite TV in the US. When he had it,
it turned out to be inconvenient; he got rid of it. When he had a
choice of owning TV stations or newspapers in Boston and Chicago,
there went the papers.

So I could see stockholders and managers and heirs pressure
Murdoch to get rid of his news properties.

Only problem is, who’d want them? The News of the World is dead.
The Sun has been eclipsed by the Daily Mail in the online and
global future. Murdoch gave up on the future for The Times of London
when he built his wall around it. But that also means it’s not so
valuable a bully pulpit anymore, what with only 100k online
readers versus the enemy Guardian’s tens of millions. The New
York Post, on which he loses tens of millions of dollars a year
just as the price of a bully pulpit, would die, unless there’s an
ego and bank account even bigger than Rupert’s to resurrect it
once again. He sold his other pulpit, The Standard. Fox News? Ah,
that’s interesting. Maybe we should all gang together on
Kickstarter and buy it, eh? There’d be a market for that thing
and maybe that’d be good for the country. Sky News? He’d already
sacrificed that to get BSkyB (see: money trumps power). The
Australian papers? A fine spun-off gift for Lachlan, I’d say.

Oops. I forgot the Wall Street Journal on which Rupert overspent
mightily. You want to leave a legacy, Rupert: Make it the
beneficiary of the Murdoch Trust (just as the Guardian is to be
sustained in perpetuity by its Scott Trust).

And what’s left? A gigantic, profitable media conglomerate and an
inheritance for the Murdoch clan.